L.A.’s Rampart District gave me the life I wanted to lead

This article first appeared on Zocalo Public Square.

When I first moved into the Rampart neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1986, the gunfire down the alley outside our bedroom often kept me awake at night—not just the pop-pop of single shots but the stuttering rat-a-tat of automatic weapons. Police helicopters beat the air overhead, shining down bright conical beams that swept across the windows.

There was a Blade Runner feeling to the neighborhood in those days, the sense that citizens were scuttling for cover, beneath some perpetual eye in the sky. It was funny to think that in 1910 this was the toniest neighborhood in L.A., the place where Otis Chandler built his mansion. It’s also where Raymond Chandler first lived when he moved to the city in 1912, and where he set one of his earliest stories, Pearls Are A Nuisance. The old lady in that story whose pearls have been stolen lived on my street, Carondelet.

I settled into the 1930s Spanish-style apartment building the summer I married my husband, artist-photographer Anthony Hernandez. He had lived in the apartment since returning from Vietnam in 1970. The rent was cheap, and we were young and committed to living off our art. I had just sold my first book, a collection of short stories, and begun working on a novel.

The desk where I wrote looked down on the alley where a lot of the action took place. Teenage kids gathered there to smoke dope, and elderly Mexican men sat playing cards in an open garage lined with girlie pictures. Every day, the grandmothers came out to do their shopping from the vegetable trucks that plied the area..

After I long day of writing, I would head out in the afternoon and ride my bike over to the Ambassador Hotel. You could join a swim club there and use the pool. I rode down Rampart Boulevard and through Lafayette Park, weaving my way through the groups of homeless men hanging out on the benches. I started taking pictures every day, photographing  homeless men, the beautiful children of Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants who were playing on the sidewalks, and mothers pushing strollers to and from the Big 6 Market.  When the Ambassador finally closed, I moved over to the Sheraton Townhouse and its pool. Europeans stayed in the Townhouse, having booked their visits without knowing that the area became rough after dark.

In time, the Townhouse closed, a victim of the unrest that followed the beating of Rodney King, and the area went even further downhill. The public library—the Felipe de Nueve branch—was also closed, leaving the homeless to find somewhere else to take their afternoon naps.

By the mid-1990s, it was hard to find a patch of living grass in LaFayette Park.

A police substation was installed in MacArthur Park with round-the-clock patrols. Otis Art Institute, where I had once seen a performance artist belt out an edgy rendition of “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To” while sticking Ritz crackers covered in Cheese Whiz to her naked body, moved to a safer neighborhood out by the airport. It began to feel as if the neighborhood, was dying.

What few people fully understood then was how a cadre of truly rotten cops from the Rampart narcotics division had been terrorizing locals for years, extorting money, planting evidence, stealing drugs, even shooting people. They covered up their crimes with lies and violence against an easily intimidated immigrant population. When the Rampart police story broke, it became a national scandal and shocked people. But somehow it didn’t surprise me.

I had seen the young men limping down sidewalks, walking with canes, victims of the endemic violence. I’d passed the little shrines set up on sidewalks to commemorate the dead. I’d watched the cops harassing citizens—wearing the signature mirrored glasses and sometimes even smoking cigars while they frisked kids lined up against brick walls.

Rampart has always served as a place where filmmakers could find an edge, whether it was locations for Barfly (the Bryson Apartments and Silver Dollar Bar), or the more recent Drive (Big Six Market), or the little wooden houses shown in the opening scenes of L.A. Confidential. The television show Adam-12 (1968 to 1975) followed two cops—one played by Martin Milner, who died recently—in LAPD’s Rampart Division station. If you wanted tough, noir, or seedy and run-down, Rampart was your district..

These days, there’s less violence — almost no gunfire at night. There’s also not much evidence of gentrification— immigrant families can still afford to live here. No upscale coffee shops or cafes have moved in, there’s still only Maggie’s Donuts, Taco Bell, the little pupusa place and marisco joint, and of course the original Tommy’s Hamburgers. The branch library has reopened

Occasionally something happens to remind you Rampart’s still a tough place. Last spring we returned from an early dinner with friends to find the neighborhood on lock-down. We were stopped at the head of our street by a cop who, after learning our address, told us we couldn’t go home. A man with a rifle was holding a woman hostage in the apartment building next to ours. We killed some time visiting friends in Silver Lake, and headed home around midnight when it was over.

It’s funny to think Anthony has lived in our apartment for 45 years and I’ve been there almost 30. The rent has hardly changed in all that time. It’s worked out the way we hoped it would, allowing us to pursue our art without taking jobs. You could say the neighborhood has been very kind to us. We owe it a lot.

Judith Freeman is the author of five works of fiction, as well as The Long Embrace, a biography of Raymond Chandler and portrait of his marriage. Her memoir, The Latter Days, will be published next year by Pantheon.